Don't write off the communists - China's ruling party is eminently adaptable

John Garnaut

If the word "Stalinist" describes a governing style of terror and totalitarianism, then it hasn't applied to China since the 1970s. And yet, despite no longer commanding the economy or the mundane detail of everyday life, the Chinese Communist Party today is as thoroughly embedded in every significant institution as Stalin's regime ever was.

The basic organisational map of the Chinese Communist Party is borrowed directly from Stalin and Lenin: standing committees, politburos and central committees; an organisational department that appoints every important position in the country from its list of names; a propaganda department that directs media, history, entertainment and education; a military that answers directly to the party; and so on.

But Stalin never embedded party committees and offices in universities and state-owned companies like the Chinese Communist Party does today. Stalin took the party's "political commissars" out of the Red Army, while China's People's Liberation Army has reinserted a parallel hierarchy of party control, including 90,000 party cells.

The Chinese Communist Party can reasonably claim to have done more for the welfare of its people than any other governing organisation on the planet. Remarkably, it has done this while replicating, extending, modernising and disguising Stalin's infrastructure of bureaucratic, authoritarian power.

Mapping how power works in China is a mind-boggling challenge. So far the world has done a pitiful job of it. That's why the forthcoming book by Richard McGregor, a former Financial Times Beijing bureau chief (and former Herald reporter), is significant. He has begun the task of systematically charting the hidden arteries of power in the world's most well-resourced, sophisticated and successful dictatorship.

Communist party power is most evident to the outside world when it manifests as state violence. But the narrative of Chinese state harassment, detention and occasional brutality that is so familiar outside the country is almost unrecognisable to most Chinese people who reside well within the frontier of what the party deems acceptable behaviour.

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"Terror is just a side-effect these days, used relatively sparingly and, in large part, reluctantly,'' writes McGregor in The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers. "In modern China the system runs on seduction rather than suppression. It aims to co-opt, not coerce, the population. But even so, terror remains essential to the system's survival and is deployed without embarrassment when required."

McGregor traces the party's new channels of monitoring and control that have grown as society has grown. How private companies have learnt to open themselves up to colonisation by the party in return for having space to operate. How private law firms open party cells. How scholars carefully balance intellectual independence with the threat of marginalisation.

"The problem in writing about the party, though, is that, much as the party might be staring you in the face, you can't easily glare back," writes McGregor. "The party and its functions are generally masked or dressed up in other guises."

As with any broad analysis, it is possible to quibble with the detail. What looks like conspiracy and strategy from afar can seem messier and more complicated up close. But that's not really the point. The party has survived and thrived precisely because it has learnt it does not need to control the detail.

The party's mutation into a responsive, flexible and modern dictatorship is a direct response to the existential threat posed by a leadership split in response to the Tiananmen protests in 1989, and then the collapse of the Soviet bloc immediately afterwards.

Before that, in the late 1970s, it embarked on an extraordinary era of political and economic reform to salvage its legitimacy after the poverty, tragedy and orchestrated chaos of the Cultural Revolution and earlier campaigns.

"After each catastrophe, the party has picked itself off the ground, reconstituted its armour and reinforced its flanks," writes McGregor. "Somehow it has outlasted, outsmarted, outperformed or simply outlawed its critics, flummoxing the pundits who have predicted its demise at numerous junctures."

The party is taking on a uniquely ambitious enterprise by maintaining a dictatorship over the largest, most diverse and rapidly evolving society - in the information age. It is aware of the degree of difficulty.

It is headed towards another crossroad: how to control and adapt to the rising and evolving expectations of a richer, more confident citizenry. Chinese people are now demanding social and individual justice as well as better living standards. It would be a brave pundit who bets against the party's capacity to evolve to meet the challenge.